Friday, October 21, 2011

Does The Future-NRA Know About This?

The new Fox series Terra Nova is the most expensive show on tv, with an estimated budget of $4 million per episode. But there appears to be an area where they are skimping on the dineros: props.

Now, every sci fi series has had to take "found" objects, modify them, and turn them into futuristic props of some kind. The old Star Trek was famous for taking fancy silver salt shakers and, with some snazzy sound effects, turning them into Dr. McCoy's 23rd century surgical tools.

The prop people on the original Star Wars took a German broom-handled Mauser pistol, added machined parts, a scope, a new muzzle, and created Han Solo's iconic blaster.

But Terra Nova, according to this piece at io9.com, apparently took some orange and blue plastic NERF toy guns and...just spray-painted them black to use as guns. They didn't use the NERF guns as the basis of a new cool future weapon, adding cool new parts to it, as the Han Solo weapon above was created; they just took something that was one color and painted it another.

For $4 mil per episode, I would have expected some original designs, manufactured just for the show (after all, in the storyline, the tech comes from 100 years in our future). But, seriously, spray-painted plastic NERF guns? That's something a movie with a $4,000 budget would pull.